matically pronounced
him to be ignorant, drove Freeman into print. If he had disagreed
with Froude on the main question, the only question which matters
now, he would have been justified, and more than justified, in
setting out the opposite view. A defence of Becket against Henry, of
the Church against the State, from the pen of a competent writer,
would have been as interesting and as important a contribution as
Froude's own papers to the great issue between Sacerdotalism and
Erastianism. There is a great deal more to be said for Becket than
for Wolsey; and though Freeman found it difficult to state any case
with temperance, he could have stated this case with power. But, much
as he disliked Froude, he agreed with him. "Looking," he wrote, "at
the dispute between Henry and Thomas by the light of earlier and of
later ages, we see that the cause of Henry was the right one; that
is, we see that it was well that the cause of Henry triumphed in the
long run." Nevertheless he rushed headlong upon his victim, and
"belaboured" Froude, with all the violence of which he was capable,
in The Contemporary Review. Hitherto his attacks had been anonymous.
Now for the first time he came into the open, and delivered his
assault in his own name. Froude's forbearance, as well as his own
vanity, had blinded him to the danger he was incurring. The first
sentence of his first article explains the fury of an invective for
which few parallels could be found since the days of the Renaissance.
"Mr. Froude's appearance on the field of mediaeval history will
hardly be matter of rejoicing to those who have made mediaeval
history one of the chief studies of their lives." Freeman's pedantry
was, as Matthew Arnold said, ferocious, and he seems to have
cherished the fantastic delusion that particular periods of history
belonged to particular historians. Before writing about Becket Froude
should, according to this primitive doctrine, have asked leave of
Freeman, or of Stubbs, or of an industrious clergyman, Professor
Brewer, who edited with ability and learning several volumes of the
Rolls Series. That to warn off Froude would be to warn off the public
was so much the better for the purposes of an exclusive clique. For
Froude's style, that accursed style which was gall and wormwood to
Freeman, "had," as he kindly admitted, "its merits." Page after page
teems with mere abuse, a sort of pale reflection, or, to vary the
metaphor, a faint echo from Cicero